The Ladies' Lending Library

by Janice Kulyk Keefer

  Darka hasn’t been stupid enough to give up thoughts of Jamie Ashford, just because of her gentleman caller. Where does she get that expression from? Not the movie magazines which her mother so disapproves of—and yet the expression is something Darka associates with her mother’s world, her mother’s time. She is wondering about this while the ladies gather on Sasha Plotsky’s veranda for an impromptu meeting of the Lending Library, a Wednesday pick-me-up to break the back of what always seems the longest week of the summer, the last week before the End, as interminable as the last week of a pregnancy. Darka’s still working at the riddle even as she’s sitting Katia down at Sonia’s dressing table. Gentleman caller. She undoes Katia’s ponytail and starts teasing her hair, from tips to scalp, so it sticks out like a dark dandelion clock all round her.

  “You’re lucky,” Darka tells her. “You have good, thick hair—not coarse, but with a lot of body.”

  Darka is going to become a beauty consultant when she leaves school this year. She won’t be any old Avon Lady, though. She wants to have a shop of her own; she wants to do a hairdressing course; she already has a diploma from the Charm School her parents finally agreed to send her to, after she’d begged and pleaded and threatened not to eat or drink until they gave in. She’ll even be helping to pay the fees with money she’s earned from babysitting and stacking cans at Stenko’s grocery.

  “What did you learn at Charm School?” Katia asks, eyes on the mirror that shows Darka spraying and shaping the puffball of hair into a rigid helmet. With enormous satisfaction, Katia decides that the hairdo adds ten years to her face.

  “How to put on makeup,” Darka answers. “We sat at this long, white counter, with white smocks on—everything was so clean, like at a hospital. Each of us had a mirror with a ring of light bulbs—they were so hot, they melted the makeup. We always started with the concealer.” Gentleman. She shakes out the shoebox she’s brought along, till a mass of makeup litters the tabletop. Then she picks up a fat stick like a pale orange crayon. “You don’t have anything to cover up yet, but let’s pretend we want to hide that beauty spot over there. See? It’s vanished. Magic.”

  Katia touches the place where the beauty mark was. She can see the ghost of it under the orange blob, but she would rather die than say so.

  “Now for the foundation.” Darka opens a jar of something beige and slippery that she strokes over Katia’s face. “Then powder—that’s to set the look—you know, like after you mix up a cake and put it in the oven. Close your eyes.”

  Rouge is seared on Katia’s cheeks from a small, greasy pot; from a little palette of colours for her eyelids, Darka chooses Dusky Dreams. Eyeliner. Mascara. She’s talking all the time, Katia responding with yeses and uhms and reallys, her eyes shut tight while Darka tells her how she was taught to do a gliding walk, as if every bone in her body were made of Jell-O. How to pull on gloves, both wrist length and elbow. The correct way of getting up and sitting down, and how to cross your legs. Gentle man.

  “Now open your mouth—just a little. Good, now smack your lips, just to spread the colour—just a little, I said—do you want to end up like Bozo the Clown? Okay, all done—take a look.”

  Darka snatches the scratchy towel from round Katia’s shoulders as the girl stares into the glass. From chin to waist the mirror shows the skinny body of a twelve-year-old wearing a halter top over a chest flat as an ironing board. But there’s a line drawn, like the borders that divide countries in her school atlas, countries tinted different colours to show they’re meant to be separate. The line appears at her chin, where her tan turns into something peachy-orange. Her lips have a completely different shape, and her cheekbones jut out angrily, as though she’d held them against a hot iron. And her eyes—they are long and slanting and smoky, somehow.

  “Wait!” Darka takes her comb, wets a few strands of Katia’s hair with spit, and sculpts a kiss curl hanging down over the middle of her forehead.

  “Gorgeous.”

  “Gorgeous,” Katia whispers back.

  She looks at herself in the mirror, turning her head this way and that, pursing up her lips, frowning, smiling dopily, like Marilyn Monroe. She leans forward, tugs the straps of her halter top down over her shoulders, and pushes up her non-existent breasts with her hands. “Look, Darka,” she cries in her best imitation of a grown woman’s voice, “I’m a sex kitten! I’m a slut!”

  But there’s no response from Darka, neither laughter nor impatience. Katia wheels around, stares at the older girl and gives a little cry. Darka looks as if she’s been turned into wood; her shoulders slope, and suddenly her eyes are the eyes of an old, old woman.

  “You okay?” Katia asks. There’s no answer, so she tugs at Darka’s blouse. “Why don’t you make yourself up like Cleopatra, Darka? I bet you’d look a million times better than that old Liz Taylor. I bet if you did your hair, and put those long black lines on your eyes and went out to Midland and sat in the diner, they’d be rushing up to sign you on.”

  Suddenly, angrily, Darka comes to. “Who, Katia? Who’s going to rush up to me?”

  “Producers—you know.”

  “In Midland, Ontario?”

  “Maybe they’re on vacation—maybe they’ve just stepped off their powerboats and they’re hungry and they want to grab a bite to eat, and they walk into the diner and see—”

  “Darka Marchuk? Sure.”

  Now comes Katia’s moment of inspiration. She jumps up and grabs the older girl’s arms. “Come on, Darka. Let me do your face.”

  To Katia’s amazement, Darka slumps down at the vanity table, keeping her eyes fixed on the laundry-reddened hands in her lap. Caller. Call her. Collar. First Katia takes out the rollers and the pins that skewer them in place. She brushes Darka’s hair so that it makes a golden cloud around her face, with the inky roots barely visible. She puts no foundation on Darka’s skin, which is beautifully tanned, but slaps on the rouge and lipstick as thick as she can. Finally, she takes the eyeliner, and then, when it proves too delicate, the eyebrow pencil, drawing a thick line all round Darka’s eyes and from the corners almost to her hairline. While this transformation is taking place, Darka remains still as a stone, the way an actress would keep perfectly calm and still having her makeup applied before she steps onto the stage.

  “Hail, great enchantress of the east, Cleopatra, whose name means ‘glory of her race.’”

  Katia’s imitation of Laura at her most pompous and self-absorbed is dead-on; Darka can’t help but laugh. But when she looks up at the mirror to see what’s been done to her, her mouth falls open. Apart from her hair, which is dyed anyway, she could be—she is Cleopatra. If he could see her now, if he could see her like this—

  “Wait,” Katia says, running to the closet, pulling wildly at the clothes hanging there, till she finds, at the very back, the perfect thing. A gold, clingy dress, as out of place among the shorts and shirts and pedal-pushers as a chocolate on a plate of pork and beans. “Lamé,” whispers Katia. It’s a word she pulls out of the air, part of the magic that’s turning Darka from a drudge into a movie star—into an Egyptian Queen.

  Darka hesitates, afraid that Sonia might come home early from the Plotskys’ or that Laura will burst in, cross at being left out, threatening to tell on them. “All right,” she says at last. “I’ll be careful.”

  She orders Katia to close her eyes, then tugs off her shorts, stepping into the web of shimmering gold, sucking in her belly as she zips up the back.

  “Now you can look.”

  Darka is reclining on the bed as if it were a barge. She could have been poured from a bottle of syrup. “Come here, O Antony, and do the bidding of the empress of thy heart,” cries Cleopatra.

  Katia can’t help herself. She makes a low, sweeping bow and struts to the bed, where she’s enfolded in a pair of queenly arms, just like in the photo in the Souvenir Booklet. The lamé scratches worse than the rollers: Katia can hardly breathe, and Darka’s breasts suddenly seem to her enormous, deformed, wi
th pointy nipples jutting out, instead of being perfectly round and smooth as foam. There are holes in the dress, just below the bust—she puts out her hand to touch one, and Darka slaps it away, then bursts into giggles. Suddenly, they are jumping on the bed, Darka holding the gown up in both her hands, the bedsprings squeaking and thudding, the two of them breathless with laughter, till they collapse, at last, in a heap. Katia’s face is pressed against Darka’s breast: when she pulls away at last, two black, eye-shaped streaks appear on the gold lamé.

  “Bozhe—she’ll have kittens—quick, we’ve got to hide it.”

  “Fix your face first,” Darka hisses. She shoves Katia towards the bathroom, wriggles out of the golden gown, and leaps into her clothes.

  Katia scrubs at her face as hard as she can; when she returns, the dress has been shoved back to the farthest reaches of the closet. Now it’s Darka’s turn to scour her face with the washcloth Katia’s brought her, swearing when the mascara gets into her eyes. Katia doesn’t hear her: she is scrabbling to sweep the tubes and pots littering the dressing table back into Darka’s shoebox. When she finishes, she goes at her hair, yanking the brush through till her scalp aches, while Darka smoothes the bedclothes, saying words Katia’s never heard before: fat, ugly words made uglier by panic.

  When the door bursts open at last, they scream as if they’re expecting a posse, but it’s only Baby Alix, her face pale, her eyes bright and black as ever. She stands there with her arms at her sides and no expression on her face. If she’d looked angry, or amazed, it would have been all right; it’s the blankness that spooks them, so that Darka scoops her up and carries her out. It’s up to Katia to collect the washcloth and shoebox; to make sure the room looks just as it did before they came in, as though nothing out of the ordinary has happened here, no makeup, no dress-up, no magic. Softly, Katia closes the door behind her, then dumps the shoebox in Darka’s room and stalks off to the porch.

  There are at least six dead flies on the floor, but she makes no move to sweep them up. That is Darka’s job, she tells herself. She jumps into the hammock, setting it swinging, wildly. It helps her to get over her distress and then her fury at herself for having talked Darka into making her up in the first place; at Darka for having frightened her so by the way she’d seemed to burn out, just like a light bulb, with no warning; and at the Cleopatra dress for having been hanging there in the cupboard at all. Her mother will kill her! It’s all Tania’s fault; if she and Tania were still best friends, she would never have spent the afternoon with Darka, never gone near the shoebox full of makeup. Best friends, worst friends: what are they now, she and Tania? They haven’t had a fight; there have been no scenes, no heated words. There have been no words at all, and that’s the trouble.

  Suddenly, Katia finds herself saying her grandmother’s name, softly, sadly, then coaxingly, as if she could make Baba Laryssa appear beside her, just by the force of her wanting. Her baba would have been able to help her, would have taught her what to do. She would have started by asking Katia a few questions, not trick ones, not angry ones that supplied their own, wrong answers, but questions that made you think about what mattered most, and what didn’t count. She wouldn’t have lectured, and she wouldn’t have shouted; she’d just have asked questions and made Katia think, until everything became—not easy, but clear.

  Katia sets the hammock rocking again with a fierce shove of her foot. She wants to tear the hammock from its hooks, rip it into pieces; she wants to hurt something as badly as she herself is hurting now with missing her baba. Missing—as if Baba Laryssa were a shoe or an umbrella, something you could find at a lost and found. Katia pounds her fist into the palm of her hand. She will not cry—what good would that do? She will not call out her grandmother’s name any more: she doesn’t believe in ghosts. And she won’t pray to God, either, the way the priest said they must do at the funeral, pray that Laryssa Metelsky be forgiven her sins, voluntary and involuntary, as her soul stood before her God. It was God who ought to be asking forgiveness of Baba Laryssa—of Katia, for having taken her baba away from her.

  When the hammock stops rocking, a phrase comes into Katia’s head, a line from a movie she’s seen on TV. What’s eating at you? Was that it? She’s eating her heart out—maybe that was how it went. She bites at her lips, bites down hard, till she reaches the salt and rust taste of blood. She curls herself into a ball and, raising her hand to her face, starts biting at a hangnail on her thumb. Before she knows it, she is sucking her thumb, her eyes shut tight, and the hole in her heart as small as she can make it.

  She falls asleep like this; she turns in her sleep and the thumb, thank God, drops out of her mouth, so that when Yuri creeps up to the hammock and starts tickling her with a leaf he’s plucked from a sumach tree, she’s not doing anything to give herself away. It’s as though she knows he’s there even before the leaf touches the tip of her nose: she opens her eyes and stares right into his face, startling him by not crying out, by showing no sign of surprise at all.

  Slowly, Katia pulls herself out of the hammock and walks down the porch steps to Tunnel Road, Yuri at her heels. She walks deliberately, keeping her eyes from straying to the clambering weeds that only last year had been her grandmother’s carefully tended rows of beans and carrots and onions. When she reaches the road, Yuri puts out his hand to her shoulder, stopping her. He nods in the direction of the sleep-house, and after a moment, Katia shrugs and makes for the little track to that building’s back door.

  Abandoned, the hammock swings gently to and fro, until it finally comes to rest. Flies keep crawling up the screens, clinging to the mesh, waiting to join the others on the floor.

  “So?” She has her hands on what will be her hips, one day; there’s a band of bare skin between the place where her halter top ends and her pedal-pushers start.

  “So—let’s see,” he says, scuffing his feet against the floor, sitting on the sagging bed in the sleep-house across from the Martyns’ cottage.

  “Only if you do,” Katia insists. “At the same time.”

  Yuri shrugs, then drags himself off the bed so that he’s standing opposite his cousin. They are the same height, their bodies lean and muscular. With their dark eyes and hair, their olive skin, they could be brother and sister.

  Anyone spying through the window would swear that what happens next has been carefully rehearsed: Yuri unbuttoning his faded cotton shirt as Katia crosses her arms to pull up her crinkled top; Katia pulling at her shorts as Yuri unzips his. Their clothing falling to the floor, pooling at their ankles as if it were something foreign to them, a puddle of brackish water they must wade through to get to some cleaner, drier destination.

  Watching at the window, glasses pressed against the glass, you might note the moment’s hesitation before boy and girl, thumbs hooked into the elastic of their underpants, tug the white cotton down, and then, in the first awkward moment of this mutual disrobing, wriggle free, balancing first on one leg, then the other, for all the world like fledgling storks. Perhaps you would notice how solemn they look, and how, instead of giggling or pulling faces, they seem to recognize the gravity of this first moment of nakedness not just between them, but for each. For no matter how many times in the past they have stripped for baths, or changed from wet bathing suits, their bodies have been as weightless, as careless as the clothes they discarded. Only now, in this protracted moment on a hot summer day, in a sleep-house smelling of pine resin and sun, do they seem to register the shock of nakedness. The air prickles their skins, drawing a sharp, indelible line around their bodies.

  This moment is so full and so charged, so intensely private, that the watcher at the window closes her eyes, withdrawing her face from the glass; sinking onto the earth on which, straining, on tiptoe, she’s been planted.

  “It’s okay, Andriy,” Katia croons, as if he were a baby to be sung to sleep. “It’s just pretend, like dress-up. No one’s going to know—right, Yuri?”

  “Right. Hey, Andriy, remember Fantasia? Re
member how Mickey wears a dress when he’s working for that Sorcerer guy?”

  Andriy just hangs his head and shuts his eyes. He doesn’t need eyes to see himself tricked out in one of Darka’s skirts and cotton blouses, under which he is wearing his swimming trunks, and a brassiere stuffed with socks. On his feet are Darka’s flip-flops; his longish butter-blond hair has been wetted with spit and carefully waved by Katia.

  “Good,” Katia says, moving in with the shoebox where Darka keeps her makeup. “Now, don’t move—just keep still. By the time I’ve finished you are going to be bee-yoo-tee-ful!”

  They are in the sleep-house: Pavlo is posted as lookout by the front door, in case any grown-up or that lemon of a Laura should come by. But there’s no need for him to sound the warning: nobody shows any curiosity at what such quiet, out-of-the-way children could be up to. Once Katia is finished with the lipstick and rouge, the eye shadow and eyebrow pencil, she hands Andriy a mirror, exclaiming, “You’re much prettier than Darka!” quite honestly, no cruelty intended. Andriy refuses to look at the face that’s no longer his own; he stares at his feet as Katia undoes the bib round his neck and whispers, stagily, for she is boiling over with pride and excitement: “Quick—let’s go. We can’t afford to take any chances. We’ve got to hurry before they start missing us.”

  Pavlo gives the all-clear, and they sneak out the back door, the one facing Tunnel Road. They’ve chosen the time of day when the mothers are busy making supper, and Darka’s sweeping out the cottage, and Laura’s telling stories to Bonnie and Baby Alix. It’s a Friday, and there’s the extra work of tidying up to do, so that the cottages will look decent by the time the husbands arrive. Yuri is confident that at this particular moment, no one will have the leisure to come strolling by.

  For Yuri, not Pavlo, has taken on the major role. When he thinks about it, his insides go cold. He doesn’t need any grownup to tell him that there’s nothing heroic in taking advantage of someone weaker, less fortunate, than they: in tricking Billy Baziuk, using Andriy as bait. So Yuri doesn’t think about it. He concentrates, instead, on undoing the damage already done. That trickle of pee down his leg at the Durkowskis—peeing his pants because some old baba pretended to hold a gun to his head. Losing authority that day at the Seech to Pavlo Vesiuk, of all people—Pavlo with his narrow eyes and sleek, flat head, more like a weasel than a lion. If he had taken the time to think things through, Yuri might have wondered why Pavlo hadn’t insisted on grabbing the spotlight for himself. But Yuri has been too busy arranging things, building the trap, earning what Pavlo calls “credibility.”